Many words have already been committed to how incredible a human being Margaret Thatcher was. Independent of your politics, she's most widely remembered as an uncompromising, iconic woman who led Britain through the Reagan years and did so unafraid of pissing many, many people off. But there's one oft-overlooked element of Thatcher's long, storied life that you could argue has affected far more citizens of the world than any policy or diplomatic decisions she ever made. Margaret Thatcher helped invent soft-serve ice cream, after earning a chemistry degree at Oxford:

Tasked with whipping more air into ice cream, she produced a type of 'soft-scoop' cream which could be pumped through a machine. It heralded Mr Whippy vans and the '99' cone.

The Iron Lady was just one member of a team of chemists doing research for food manufacturer J. Lyons and Co, but as you alternately blame or lionize her for her positions on the Falklands War, the 1984 U.K. miners' strikes, or on the end of the Cold War, just think about how much worse your summer beach days would be without this young woman — who didn't even seem to know what she wanted to do with her life until after she gave us a better ice cream.